Great content is one of your business’ most important assets. This rings true especially for customer service.
It can enhance your existing customer’s experiences of your products and services, strengthening brand loyalty, as well as create new positive experiences for prospective customers, compelling them to come back for more. Great content really is the secret ingredient that can delight your audience and make your brand’s reputation shine.
However, to achieve great content output, it is vital you have the right technology in place to manage and support your goals. And in a recent survey from the Content Marketing Institute, 33% of companies are failing in this regard.
Many readers will have heard of content management systems (CMS) – a cost-effective and efficient system used for controlling and managing content, from web pages and documents to images and videos. However, for many businesses today, a typical CMS has too many limitations to be considered effective. Issues with information findability and inefficient copy and pasting of content has led forward-thinking organizations to seek out a more structured approach.
The Challenge
When a customer has a problem or a question, they expect answers fast. When that experience leads them down a rabbit hole and they are unable to find the information they need, that feeling of frustration becomes associated with your organization. Nobody wants to spend hours going round in circles or sitting on hold while a customer service representative tries to hunt down the answer.
Insurance company California Casualty were using a CMS to store around 35,000 documents. On inspection, they found that their employees were spending between 30 minutes and an hour, every day, searching for information. Moreover, they found it so difficult to reliably update documents that even when staff found something relevant, they didn’t trust its accuracy.
Despite the efforts of the company’s dedicated knowledge management team, content that was duplicated in different documents had discrepancies that caused confusion, and there was little they could do to improve the situation. As a result, customers were often kept waiting while staff tried to find the right information for them.
Information findability and consistency has become intrinsically linked to a feeling of trust and brand loyalty in customers, and it is vital that customer service managers prioritize these issues now. But if your traditional CMS is unsuitable, what’s the solution?
Enter, the CCMS
For unmatched information findability and trustworthiness, you need a specific type of content management system: a component content management system (CCMS). The defining difference between a traditional CMS and a CCMS is that where a CMS stores content as documents, or unstructured content, a CCMS stores content as a set of smaller related components. These are then combined in automated ways to create publishable deliverables such as PDFs, web pages or other formats. A component within a CCMS could be a word, phrase, paragraph, series of paragraphs, image, video, table, graph, or any other ‘piece’, ‘chunk’, ‘atom’ or ‘module’ of content.
Why manage content this way? Because when you structure content by breaking it into components, you can do a lot of things that transform its findability. And that also means you can update it more easily to ensure that it’s accurate and trustworthy.
Since implementing a CCMS, California Casualty have established a ‘single source of truth’ for content that staff can trust to be up to date wherever it appears, reduced the number of documents in circulation by 81%, improved information findability by 75% and improved the quality of navigation and consistency of content.
Adopting structured content is a complete game changer for customer service organizations. With a single source of truth for content, you only need to create your component once before publishing it to the various places its needed. When there’s an update, simply edit the original component and the changes will roll out to every place the component is linked. This ensures content remains accurate and consistent at all times – even in multiple languages.
Furthermore, a CCMS gives you powerful tools to categorize your content consistently and effectively, which is the ideal foundation for delivering relevant search results to customers. When you apply tags to content at a granular level, you can provide your customers with more specific answers to their questions.
Lastly, a CCMS empowers you to take your customer self-service to the next level with semantic AI. With AI-enriched content, not only can you implement chatbots and voice assistants for more human-like self-service interactions, but you can also deliver relevant, personalized results that your customers have come to expect.
About the Author
Fraser Doig is Associate Product marketing manager at RWS.
About RWS
RWS is the global leader in content management and translation technology and services. 90 of the top 100 global companies work with RWS. Tridion Docs provides streamlined end-to-end component content management. It includes easy web-based authoring, reviewing, versioning, translation, and publication management, underpinned by the DITA XML standard. As a true collaborative environment with a familiar Microsoft Word-style interface, subject matter experts (SMEs) in your organization can contribute their knowledge.
Authors and reviewers can work simultaneously in the same document providing comments to each other, tracking and merging changes. Tridion Docs supports global enterprise use cases including single sourcing, product documentation, learning and training, policies and procedures, and efficient translations with delivery to multiple end points such as documents, PDFs, knowledge portals, Intranet, customer facing websites, apps, chatbots, and IoT devices.
Contact RWS here or visit their website at rws.com. Twitter:@rwsgroup, Linkedin: RWSGroup.
